Star

Star is a Solana-based startup fundraising platform that replaces the traditional venture capital gatekeeping process with open, on-chain "internet rounds." Founded by Adam Bergeman, the platform is built around a conviction that any founder should be able to raise capital from their laptop without needing warm introductions to venture firms. The result is a product that blends elements of a crowdfunding site, a token launchpad, and a live-streaming pitch stage — all on Solana, with secondary liquidity powered by Meteora's AMM pools from day one of graduation.

Internet Rounds: Tokenized Equity for the Crypto-Native Era

The central concept on Star is the "internet round" — a public token sale in which a startup tokenizes a slice of its equity and raises against it directly from the community. Investors participate using a standard Solana wallet or a Star account, funding with USDC. The round runs as a dynamic market sale on a bonding curve: as more investors buy in, the token price rises, so earlier backers receive a better entry price. When the sale crosses the graduation market cap threshold, the round closes and the token transitions to live DEX trading on Meteora, giving holders an immediately liquid position.

Every project on Star mints a fixed supply of one billion Solana SPL tokens. The distribution follows a 60/20/20 split: 60% goes to the public sale during the raise, 20% is seeded into the Meteora liquidity pool at graduation to bootstrap trading depth, and the remaining 20% is reserved for the founding team under a vesting schedule — a three-month cliff followed by nine months of linear release. This structure keeps team incentives aligned with long-term token performance while ensuring the market has adequate liquidity from launch day.

The equity link percentage — configurable between 1% and 30%, with 10% as the default — determines the implied valuation of the round. The formula is straightforward: the graduation market cap divided by the equity link percentage equals the startup's fundraising valuation. Holders of equity-backed tokens gain governance rights proportional to their stake: any wallet holding 5% or more of the token supply can initiate a proposal, which is then resolved as a decision market on combinator.trade, giving backers structured, board-like influence over major company decisions.

Three Raise Tiers

Star offers three self-serve raise presets for founders, each setting the upfront capital draw and the graduation cap that determines when the bonding curve closes:

• Micro: $10,000 upfront, graduation cap of approximately $190,000
• Standard: $25,000 upfront, graduation cap of approximately $352,000
• Pro: $50,000 upfront, graduation cap of approximately $622,000

Larger raises beyond the Pro tier are available through a direct call with the Star team. The upfront amounts are drawn from the raise proceeds at launch, giving founders immediate working capital rather than requiring them to wait for the round to fully close.

Ongoing Revenue Streams Beyond the Raise

One of Star's most distinctive features for founders is that the raise itself is only the beginning of the revenue relationship. Once a token graduates and begins secondary trading on Meteora, founders receive 0.5% of every secondary trade on their token — indefinitely. This transforms the token from a one-time fundraising event into a long-running revenue stream tied directly to the ongoing activity and interest in the project.

Beyond trading fees, founders also access a staged capital unlock schedule tied to market cap milestones. As the token's market cap climbs through successive bands — from $2 million through $160 million — the platform releases additional capital weekly in $2,500 allowances. The cumulative unlock cap across all bands reaches $8.6 million, meaning a project that achieves sustained growth can access a significant total payout well beyond the initial raise amount, all without diluting the token supply further.

Legal Structure via Bedrock

Star handles the legal scaffolding that typically stalls early-stage crypto fundraises. For approximately $7,500, the platform arranges incorporation through Bedrock: a British Virgin Islands company paired with a Cayman Special Purpose Company structure. This SPC architecture is the vehicle through which the equity link is formalized, connecting the on-chain token to the off-chain legal entity in a manner that institutional and sophisticated investors can evaluate. Founders who need a recognized corporate structure before they can credibly raise no longer need to navigate international legal service providers independently.

STAR Platform Token

Star has its own native platform token, STAR, which plays a governance and economic role within the ecosystem. Trading volume revenue generated by the platform is committed to STAR token buybacks and burns, creating a deflationary mechanic tied to the platform's overall throughput. STAR can also be earned through referral activity, incentivizing community growth. Token holders participate in platform governance through the same decision market infrastructure used by individual project tokens.

Star's Own Launch as Proof of Concept

Star did not merely build the rails — it ran its own raise on them at launch. The platform raised $450,000 in 48 hours for itself, a result the team attributed in part to an experiment where they turned on a live-stream during the raise. That live-streaming component has since become a core feature of the platform, allowing founders to pitch directly to potential investors in real time as the bonding curve fills. Star has since earned $300,000 in trading fees on its own token, demonstrating that the ongoing fee model works in practice.

As of the time of reporting, three projects had completed raises on the platform, collectively raising $1.1 million. These early projects serve as the initial validation of the internet round model and the 0.5% perpetual trading fee structure.

Why It Matters

Star addresses a genuine structural gap. Traditional venture fundraising is opaque, relationship-dependent, and geographically concentrated. ICO-era fundraising was open but unstructured and legally murky. Star attempts to thread between these extremes: legally incorporated, equity-linked, bonding-curve-priced, and open to any Solana wallet holder from day one. The Meteora integration ensures that investors have a liquid exit path rather than being locked into illiquid private allocations. The cap unlock schedule and perpetual trading fee mean that Star's incentives as a platform are aligned with founders who build durably rather than those who raise and disappear.

Adam Bergeman's stated ambition — enabling any founder to raise capital from a laptop without needing VC introductions — points toward a larger vision: making startup investing as accessible as buying a token, and making startup fundraising as straightforward as launching a bonding curve.